Postcard Bandit hopes for transfer to WA

Reporter: Mick O'Donnell

MAXINE McKEW: We turn now to a notorious name in Australian criminal history. Brenden Abbott, dubbed the 'Postcard Bandit', is a convicted bank robber and serial prison escapee. Now under lock and key in a Queensland jail, he's considered a man who is not safe to move. That helps explain why Brenden Abbott's application to be transferred to his home state of Western Australia has been blocked. He's also deemed to be a risk to the WA community. But Abbott's current girlfriend, a Darwin beautician, is determined her man will return to Perth to face the music for the crimes he committed there. And the former fugitive is also arguing that his request to return to his home state is all about concern for his one-time victims. Mick O'Donnell reports.

MICK O'DONNELL: But this is how the Attorney-General of Western Australia Jim McGinty describes the same man.

JIM McGINTY, WA ATTORNEY-GENERAL (ON ABC RADIO): He's one of the worst offenders that we've seen in this state for a very long period of time. He has engaged in breakouts, violence. He is not somebody that we want posing a threat to our community here in Western Australia.

MICK O'DONNELL: Brenden Abbott has been in Queensland jails for the past seven years and now WA Attorney-General Jim McGinty has rejected Abbott's application for transfer to prison in his home state, even though it has been okayed by Queensland. This week, Abbott is fighting back through this letter to his girlfriend claiming it's all in the interests of his victims.

BRENDEN ABBOTT: Jim McGinty's refusal to transfer me to Western Australia is a decision he's made without considering not just my rights but the rights of the victims.

MICK O'DONNELL: Dubbed the The Postcard Bandit because of snapshots he took while on the run. Abbott has been robbing banks or in jail or escaping and running from the police since 1986. His biographer, Adelaide Journalist Derek Pedley, says that after six years in solitary confinement Abbott has begun to reflect on his crimes.

JIM McGINTY, BIOGRAPHER: It's only in the past 18 months or so, two years that he's started talking about words like "mistakes" and "remorse". He got particularly angry when a movie was done on his life a couple of years ago. He felt that painted him as some kind of anti-hero which he doesn't believe he is.

MICK O'DONNELL: The Channel 9 tele-movie and DVD 'The Postcard Bandit' paints a glorified and patly fictional portrait of Abbott, perpetuating the myth of the larrikan thief who taunted police. Brenden Abbott's escape from here, the old Fremantle prison in 1989 was typical of his colourful exploits - daring and well prepared. He was wearing a fake blue guards overall which he stitched himself in the prison workshops, as he dashed across the roofs to freedom. But for all of Abbott's so-called adventures, there are real victims, though, many of whom have never had their day in court.

CARMEL KRANZ, ROBBERY VICTIM: I think the name Brenden Abbott will be like nightmare material for me for the rest of my life.

MICK O'DONNELL: Police believe Abbott was responsible for gun shop and bank robberies in Perth in the days after his escape, alleged crimes he's never been charged over. After his escape from a Queensland jail in '97 Abbott returned to WA. Police named him, he was behind the state's biggest bank robbery. $400,000 from the Mirrabooka Commonwealth branch. Again, because he was recaptured in Darwin in'98 and sent to Queensland for robberies there, no charges were ever laid nor the outstanding crimes in WA.

BRENDEN ABBOTT: There's currently an outstanding warrant for my escape from Fremantle prison in 1989 and also numerous alleged armed robberies for banks for which the WA police feel I was the perpetrator.

MICK O'DONNELL: Carmel Kranz was a teller in a Perth bank the morning Abbott and his accomplice dropped out of the ceiling.

CARMEL KRANZ: They left us with a feeling of angst and anxiety that can come and go just like rain comes from the sky. It can come and go at any time.

MICK O'DONNELL: Former West Coast Eagles football player Karl Langdon was a young teller in the Belmont queue on that day too.

KARL LANGDON, ROBBERY VICTIM: There were some work colleagues who could never return to work.

MICK O'DONNELL: The manager in the bank, Nigel Minchin, had a pistol fired inches from his head.

NIGEL MINCHIN, ROBBERY VICTIM: I think the robbery lasted for seven minutes and it was like seven hours at the time, you know. It's lasted right up to this day.

MICK O'DONNELL: While these three had their day in court, their evidence put Abbott in Fremantle jail and Abbott now says he wants to offer the same for victims of his other alleged crimes.

BRENDEN ABBOTT: Any decent right-thinking person would understand that these matters need to be brought to a head and allow these people closure once and for all so they can move on with their lives. Closure would entitle them in taking a necessary course in seeking compensation.

MICK O'DONNELL: But is he using pop psychology words to get out of Queensland whatever it takes.

DEREK PEDLEY, BIOGRAPHER: He's very much focused on getting back to Perth where he believed he will get different treatment to what he gets in Queensland. I think he feels Queensland demonise (sic) him over the 1987 escape.

MICK O'DONNELL: Abbott's girlfriend Tilly Needham who's meeting the costs of his legal fight says Abbott may face seven or eight years' jail if he returned to WA rather than 13 in Queensland.

KARL LANGDON: I don't really care where he serves his time, but I've been taught if you do the crime you do the time.

MICK O'DONNELL: Victims fear a return to Perth would mean Abbott escapes the jail time he's due for the other alleged crimes.

KARL LANGDON: He could serve his time that he had left to serve in Queensland alongside the time that he got here in Western Australia and that was something that people didn't want to see happen.

MICK O'DONNELL: Abbott's mother who lives quietly in Perth believes confining her son for six of the past seven years in solitary is extraordinary treatment for a criminal never convicted of actually harming anyone.

THELMA SALMON, MOTHER: I know he frightened the hell out of them but I don't think he was ever violent.

MICK O'DONNELL: Thelma Salmon is too ill to travel to Queensland to see her son.

THELMA SALMON: I cannot see why he can't be brought back here to serve his time so that I can go and see him.

KARL LANGDON: Just because you've behaved well, you should have thought of that before you went and dropped through ceilings and held guns at the side of people's leads.

MICK O'DONNELL: It is true that Abbott's notoriety have brought him tougher treatment than other criminals who might have done worse. Earlier this year, after strong pleas from his family, Douglas Crabbe was quietly moved from a Darwin jail to Perth.

WOMAN: He's done his time and learnt his lesson.

MICK O'DONNELL: His crime, the murder of five people when he rammed a truck into a road house in Uluru in 1983.

BRENDAN ABBOTT: My sentence exceeds that of convicted murderers and paedophiles. Prisoners guilty of committing these types of offences have been and continue to be granted transfers to Western Australia on welfare grounds.

JIM McGINTY, WA ATTORNEY-GENERAL: I'll be fighting this matter every inch of the way through the courts to make sure we are not forced here to take Queensland's criminal whom we don't want.

MICK O'DONNELL: Much of the money from Abbott's crimes has not been recovered. Tilly Needham, who has struggled with breast cancer during her boyfriend's incarceration, denies Abbott is manipulating her or the system.

TILLY NEEDHAM: For being a very good judge of character and knowing him the way I know him he's not - at all.